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Rockefeller Ctr., 1937. St. Thomas’ Church at left, site of Jackie O’s funeral. Fairchild.

Simply Add Boiling Water, 1937. Photo by Weegee.

The old Met(ropolitan Opera), Garment District, 1937. Weegee.

Still clean and gleaming, the Towers of Zenith, 1937.

Berenice Abbott, 1938

Duke Mansion, a tobacco tycoon’s, 1 E. 78th St. at Fifth Ave.

40th between 6th and 7th. Zoning generates the form.

Flam &amp; Flam, Lawyers, 165 E. 121st St.

Wall Street from 60 Wall.

From 60 Wall Street.

Cathedral Parkway (110th Street).

Columbus Circle. Building with Coke sign another of Hearst’s skyscraper bases. Unlike the one Foster is currently completing, this one was torn down for the Gulf and Western Building, now re-imagined by Phillip Johnson as the Trump International Hotel.

Jefferson Market with the hulking, deco Women’s House of Detention behind (now demolished for a park). From the barred, open windows, the ladies would hurl obscenities at passersby.

504-506 Broome St. Ancient.

Union Square West. A hilarious jumble gets A+ for accidental design. These lots once held town houses. Their dainty footprints have been preserved, so the buildings have a delicate scale regardless of their height. One is a miniature skyscraper. Scale-obsessed NIMBYs take note: you need to object to a building’s footprint, not its height.

From Jersey, the classic skyline view.

Subway Portrait. Walker Evans, 1938.

Artists and Poets, Washington Sq., 1939

42nd Street Beauties, looking west, 1939.

Clipper, 1939. Europe in 29 hours.

DC-4 Over Midtown, 1939. Hood’s Daily News Building lower right.

Fish market meets railroad under Roebling’s bridge, 1939.

Abandoned in the downpour, 1939. West Side.

Forty-second Street.

Sixth Avenue El, 1940.

Downtown from Empire State. Andre Kertesz, 1940.

1940 Photos by Andreas Feininger

Ninth Avenue El, 8th at 127th, Harlem.

The Bowery.

Bryant Park.

Downtown Skyport with Cities Service Tower.

The original twin towers.

Tower trio. Slender flattop is Irving Trust, tower at right now belongs to Trump.

New York’s greatest walk.

Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

Girlies.

Downtown gunsmith.

Three icons: Empire State; Horn and Hardart (The Automat), New York’s original restaurant chain, long gone; lamp standard, now being re-installed.

At the foot of 42nd Street: Normandie with three fat stacks in the middle, Queen Mary with three skinnier stacks at bottom. Normandie burned here, Nazi sabotage claimed. Normandie was that time’s biggest and fastest (Blue Ribbon).

1941 Photos by Feininger

Forty-second Street. Mid-size Beaux-Arts skyscraper on north side of street is Times Building, of New Year’s fame. Building still exists but reclad in mid-sixties.

Classic skyline view with America, junior edition United States.

Downtown from Jersey.

Midtown from Jersey.

Horror vacui, Hebrew style.

The hats match the canopies. Macy’s, 34th St.

Too much city? Here’s a brief Intermission from the 1870’s (we’ll be back in color)…

* * *
Tisayac by Eadweard Muybridge, best known for time-lapse photos of men and horses running before graph paper backgrounds. He also famously murdered his wife’s lover in San Francisco.

This thread didn’t get many replies when first posted, so I’m bumping it. Some folks might want to download some of these pics to their personal collections. The images are classics, so they won’t go obsolete. Or you could say they’re already obsolete --like being pre-shrunk

Castles in the Sky. This might be the most romantic picture of New York, ever.

As much as I hate to admit it, Downtown was more breathtaking and iconic before the Modernist boxes started filling in the gaps; it was only partly ameliorated by the arrival of the Twin Towers. It must've been quite a sight to see AIG, 40 Wall, and 20 Exchange soar above everyone else so majestically (and from another perspective, Woolworth).

Also, I think we should be thankful that, despite the many Beaux-Arts and other gems that we lost, New York still has more than its fair share of historic beauties, owing to the sheer scale of construction at the beginning of last century. That being said, which loss was greater - Singer, or Savoy-Plaza?

Great assembly ablarc. Thanks for reminding us this was here as some of these shots are just classic old New York. Very cool to see Gothic, Beaux-Art, Art Deco dominate the Skyline as opposed to Modernism boxes.

I must say that looking at the Singer building was kind hard to get through. It boils me up that those mo'f-ers actually had the gall to knock down such a beauty. Scumbags! How come they couldn't built that POS liberty plaza a block away I'm sure the space was available. Why was that spot so important to these vultures that they had to go out of their way to knock the Singer Building down?!?!

Sorry, I had to get that out of my system... Once again great job ablarc. Thanks.

As much as I hate to admit it, Downtown was more breathtaking and iconic before the Modernist boxes started filling in the gaps; it was only partly ameliorated by the arrival of the Twin Towers. It must've been quite a sight to see AIG, 40 Wall, and 20 Exchange soar above everyone else so majestically (and from another perspective, Woolworth).

This Queen's dead (along with the skyline that once greeted her), but tomorrow her successor, QE2, will be making a now-rare visit to the West Side Manhattan piers. She's due in from Southampton sometime before 8:00 a.m. and scheduled to sail for Newport and Canada at 5:00 p.m.